


angel with a shotgun, fighting til’ the war’s done

by felinedetached



Category: Naruto
Genre: Battle Couple, F/M, Kushina has Konan's power, Non-Linear Narrative, Origami, Sealing, War, powerswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 10:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19207297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felinedetached/pseuds/felinedetached
Summary: She’s six—or seven, she doesn’t quite remember anymore—the first time paper finds its life at her fingertips. She’s six, and she’s a daughter of Uzushio—or maybe she’s seven and they think she’s fire and water and wind all at once—but either way, her drawing paper folds itself into a running fox. It bounds around her, free and happy andalive,and her caretaker screams but Kushina laughs and lives and almost instantly falls in love.





	angel with a shotgun, fighting til’ the war’s done

When Kushina breathes in, she can feel her paper around her. It coats every surface, gives her an almost-perfect estimation of her surroundings, even with her eyes closed. She breathes out, but that awareness stays with her. It hovers in the back of her mind, a constant, calming presence. Breathing in again, she sinks back into her meditation, fingers carefully working a sheet of origami paper into shape as her awareness increases with every passing second.

Breathe in…

Breathe out.

When she stands, paper rustles. It adheres to her like a second skin; a suit of armour made of chakra and paper and will. Kushina trusts her paper—with it, there is nothing that can harm her. She is confident, calm, collected. She is Uzumaki Kushina, Konoha’s Angel, and she will not falter.

* * *

She’s six—or seven, she doesn’t quite remember anymore—the first time paper finds its life at her fingertips. She’s six, and she’s a daughter of Uzushio—or maybe she’s seven and they think she’s fire and water and wind all at once—but either way, her drawing paper folds itself into a running fox. It bounds around her, free and happy and _alive,_ and her caretaker screams but Kushina laughs and lives and almost instantly falls in love.

The elders test her, see if she can bring tags and sealed paper to life the same way she can a plain, child’s drawing paper.

She can.

 _She’ll be a terror, someday,_ they whisper. _Someone I’d never want to go up against._

Kushina’s okay with that. She’s six—or maybe seven—and she’s a daughter of Uzushio, daughter of wind and sea and paper and seals, and someday she’ll be someone people run from.

* * *

In the third world war, she took her paper and she made wings, spread them wide and stood tall and strong. She is Uzumaki Kushina, and she will protect her own. Konoha is _hers,_ hers to love and live in and fight for and destroy, if she so wishes, and she will not let anyone take that from her.

Not again.

So she stands tall and strong, with wings of paper impenetrable, her hair a bloody ribbon and her eyes a chilling, cool purple, and she smiles a challenge made of blood-stained teeth. She looks at the opposition and they look back and she says, “Bring it.”

They do. Foolish, _foolish_ people, they _do,_ and her paper rises behind her, crashes down in a wave. Her wings beat, heavy and bright and brilliant; lift her into the air. Uzumaki Kushina hangs over the battle like an avenging angel, spreads her power and her shadow over the field, and crushes all who stands against her and her own.

The scattered survivors go on to dub her Konoha’s Angel.

(They fail to notice the small orange origami fox she leaves behind her, its feet slowly soaking in the bloodstains. If they had noticed it, they may have called her something different.)

* * *

 **Name:** Uzumaki Kushina  
**Alias:** Konoha’s Angel   
**Rank:** S-rank   
**Bounty:** 120,000,000 Ryō   
**Affiliation:** Konohagakure   
**Affinities:** Unknown. Uses paper.   
**Description:** 20 years old, roughly 165 cm. Long blood-red hair, purple eyes. Typically seen wearing Konoha’s jounin uniform, sometimes seen with paper wings.

**FLEE ON SIGHT.**

* * *

She’s _there,_ when Uzushio falls. She’s eight, or maybe nine—she hasn’t really been counting—and they’re surrounded. Whispers have started up; whispers Kushina hates and loves to hear all at once. What they say is scary, but their presence means that there are people still alive. Some of _her_ people still alive.

( _We’re going to fall,_ the whispers say. _We can’t hold out much longer. The seals on the walls are cracking, and there’s no one who can get out there to fix them without dying. The only thing we have left is death._ )

Her paper flickers around her, and _Kushina_ could get out, _she_ could fix them, if she knew how.

But she doesn’t know how.

And Uzushio falls.

* * *

She meets Minato for the first time while meditating, with her paper an extension of herself, her chakra pulsing in time with her heart. He steps onto it, steps into her circle of influence; entirely unaware of what surrounds him. Entirely unaware that around him lies nothing but colossal chakra and bits of paper that have killed thousands.

Kushina’s lips twist up into a smile, something smug and wry and gorgeous, if just slightly terrifying. Her fingers pause, an unfinished origami fox in her hands, and her paper rustles in a non-existent wind, curls up and up and up until this newcomer is trapped in a dome of it. Trapped in here, with her.

“Who are you?” she asks, and she is calm, quiet, only just loud enough to be heard. She doesn’t need to move—here, she is Queen, Ruler, Goddess. Here, no matter her own position, no matter their position, nothing can harm her. Here, any position is fatal, unless you are Uzumaki Kushina.

“A Konoha jounin,” the man replies, calmer than he has any right to be. “Namikaze Minato.”

She lets her paper peel back, because she _knows_ the name Namikaze Minato—the name of the Hokage’s favoured jounin—even if she doesn’t know the man himself.

“Carry on,” she says, all arrogance that is more a tried and tested confidence, and she stands to move.

(She chose this place because it is out of the way, because no one goes there, so it is the perfect spot for meditation. If she is to be bothered, then there is no use attempting to remain here. She leaves the unfinished fox that she had been quietly folding—her way of enhancing her own meditation; give her something to do with her hands so that her mind can be freer—behind.

She doesn’t notice when Namikaze Minato, favoured of the Hokage, picks it up.)

* * *

She’s _good_ at what she does—not just at battle-ending and war-deciding moves that drain her to the bone and leave her with chronic chakra exhaustion, but at the other missions she’s sent on as well.

Uzumaki Kushina is a kunoichi, and a conventionally attractive one at that. She’s brash and she’s bold and her words sometimes border on offensive in their arrogance, but she knows _how_ to be demure. Knows how to play the poor woman who’s lost her way, or the rich lady who’s lost her husband, or the perfect prostitute exchanging favours for a paycheck.

She knows how to play these roles because she _has_ to know how: because she is a kunoichi and she is a good one.

Uzumaki Kushina is a Jounin, and that means she cannot just be good at one thing. She has to be good at _everything,_ or at least most things. Has to be well-rounded, powerful in all aspects.

And she is.

It’s just acting, in the end, even if it’s a touch distasteful. It’s just acting, and it’s acting that allows her to drape long red hair over a man’s shoulder, look at him from under her eyelashes—demure, quiet, the perfect woman for a man like him; even if she’s one he’s paid for—and listen to him talk after he’s slept with her. It’s acting that allows her to walk right into a man’s office, plant a monitoring seal and leave with no-one the wiser. It’s acting that allows her to slit the throat of those ‘showing her the way home’ and feel no guilt, in the end.

They fell for it—fell for her—and it’s their fault, in the end.

(Living in a world like this, it’s women that should be trusted the least.)

She’s a game-changer, with big jutsu and a bigger chakra pool, but she’s also a kunoichi infiltration expert, who uses her background to her advantage.

(They look at her paper and they think _that’s all she has._ They look at her power, look at how she took paper alone and used it to flatten a battlefield, and they think she perfected that and nothing else. They forget that she is Uzumaki Kushina, Princess of Uzushio, who had been the chosen sacrifice before her paper found her instead. They forget she is Uzumaki Kushina, Konoha’s lone true sealing master, and one of the last links to a now-dead country.

They forget that once, a long time ago, they feared Uzushio for their seals alone, and learnt that its people knew more than seals the hard way.

What makes her any different?)

* * *

She sits, takes a slip of orange paper from the pile on her table, makes one-two-three-four folds. Makes more, keeps going until all 62 folds have been made; keeps going until a gorgeous orange fox sits on her table, watching her with eyes that don’t exist.

Kushina smiles, soft, and folds another.

(She has yet to figure out how her childish mind made an origami fox that could move, that stood up and walked and hunted around her. For now, though, she’s fine making little origami foxes that sit perched around her house.

Maybe, she thinks, it was a seal.)

* * *

He finds her again. And again, and again, and again. He doesn’t bother her; he just sits, chakra carefully regulated, and he watches. It’s almost like he’s meditating with her.

She’s never had a meditation partner before. In all her time in Uzushio, in all her time in Konoha, no one has meditated with her before.

She thinks she likes it.

* * *

She is a weapon, to Konoha. She is the paper-wielding girl from Uzushio, who took a battlefield and turned it into a massacre.

Konoha can use that.

Kushina will let them.

* * *

They meet again, Kushina and Minato, and it is after a massacre. She is untouched by the remains of those she killed—untouched and gorgeous, with her wings of paper and her hair a ribbon of fire in the wind.

(It’s not that she’s _scared_ of getting blood on herself—she just doesn’t like it. Getting dried blood out of clothing is far more difficult than it seems, and she doesn’t want to spend hours at home cleaning when she could be training, or meditating, or making origami cranes and foxes and cats, or—especially this—at Ichiraku’s, eating Teuchi’s ramen.)

Minato, on the other hand, has blood splattered across his cheek, up his hands. It’s all over his skin and his clothing and his weapons, red splattered through his hair. He sighs, shakes off the blood dripping from his fingers and says, “Kushina? Do you happen to have a tissue or something?”

She pauses, laughs softly, says, “Minato, this is a battlefield.”

“Oh,” he says, all quiet sheepishness and soft smiles, “yeah.”

Kushina laughs again, beats her wings, once, powerful, gives herself just enough lift to drop herself by Minato’s side without getting blood and gore on her shoes, and kisses his cheek—the one not coated in the rather disgusting liquid she’d prefer not to get in her mouth or on her lips.

“You’re a dork,” she says fondly, and he rubs his the back of his head, smiling.

(This is what love is.)

* * *

 **Name:** Namikaze Minato  
**Alias:** Konoha’s Yellow Flash   
**Rank:** S-rank   
**Bounty:** 120,000,000 Ryō   
**Affiliation:** Konohagakure   
**Affinities:** Wind/Lightning. Seemingly able to teleport.   
**Description:** 20 years old, roughly 160 cm. Bright yellow hair, typically wearing Konoha’s jounin uniform and a yellow and red coat.

**FLEE ON SIGHT.**

* * *

She traces her brush over gorgeous, perfect, pristine sealing paper, an elaborate seal forming as she goes. It’s entirely untried, untested, possibly horrendously volatile.

Whether it is or not, she has to try. The memory of the first paper she ever imbued with her chakra is still bright and sparking and beautiful in her mind, and she wants to recreate it.

She wants the foxes in her house to come to life; wants them to dance around her and hunt and _live,_ even if it’s only by the grace of a seal of her own creation.

(It is. Volatile, that is. She slowly drips chakra into it, and it sets itself on fire. Kushina almost wants to cry.)

She doesn’t know what she _did_ to get it to work. When she was a child, she didn’t know sealing like this. She couldn’t know sealing like this—back in Uzushio, they didn’t teach seals of animation until third or fourth year. Kushina entered the school early, true, but she doesn’t think she was old enough to be that far through her schooling.

Doesn’t think she was old enough to have learnt the seals that animate the statues in the centre courtyard; the statues that defend the village in case of attack.

She’d been eight—or maybe seven, or maybe nine—and she hadn’t known enough to save her village, so she likely hadn’t known that.

So maybe, she thinks, maybe it was never a seal at all.

(Maybe, it was wings of gorgeous paper, a sea of death and doom and chakra, a coating over the ground that told her anything and everything that happened within it.)

* * *

They are a pair of horror and violence, carving through enemy lines like a knife through butter. It’s bloody and messy and gorey and gross, an entirely one-sided thing. It’s not a fight, and it’s not _fun,_ either. It’s just _boring._

Minato wipes his kunai on his pants, sighing. Kushina folds her paper wings into the armour-coating around her body and listens to the ways the trees rustle around them.

Blood drips, slowly, showy and more beautiful than it has any right to be, from leaves onto the mossy ground.

Neither of them could care any less.

Minato sighs again, louder this time.

“What?” Kushina says, tilting her head. She, as always, has not a drop of blood on her; not a drop of evidence of their recent activities. Minato, of course and as usual, is coated in a layer of his enemies.

He’s gross. Really.

“This is _boring,”_ Minato whines, pouting. It’s somehow adorable, even with a bit of flesh in his hair and blood between his knuckles. He tucks his kunai back into his pouch, makes to drape himself over her. Kushina side steps, easily, and he pouts again. “I want to be doing research!”

Kushina laughs, low and bright and beautiful, says, “I know,” and they head home—head back to Konoha and the house they brought together; the house with every surface covered in origami and scrolls; the house with elaborate seals carved into every door frame. Back to _their_ house.

It’s a mission complete—a boring one, done with an ease that would be enviable if it weren’t so terrifying—and that, in the end, is enough for Konoha.

(So long as they keep coming back alive, they will keep getting these missions. They are ninja of Konoha; they are powerful people who have sold their souls to a powerful place; they are death and blood and shadow hidden behind bright red hair and purple eyes, behind golden hair and a pretty smile, and they are the people that people run from.)

**Author's Note:**

> This one was written for the Naruto Mix-Up Zine, which donated all profits to the Boys & Girls Club of America! And I'm finally done with posting fics written last year, lmao.


End file.
